Largest Photo Slideshow - 15,430 photos (YouTube Video)
Summary
The original file uploaded to YouTube was an 8GB AVI. The file took 2 hours, 58 minutes to upload to YouTube. Previously I had spent 5 hours trying to upload the file during the first 4 failed upload attempts (what seemed to work was clearing the cache of my Firefox browser and setting cache at a high 1,003 mb).
The video itself was 1920 x 1080 HD, and each photo had a duration of 1 second, thus 1 photo per second. The duration of the complete video was 15,430 seconds or 4 hours, 17 minutes, and 10 seconds (not counting a 3 second introduction).
There are YouTube photo slide shows that play 5 hours and more but none that I have searched for and seen exceed 15,430 photos. The closest I found with the claim of being the largest photo slideshow ever, had 1,000 plus photos. Of course I could of set up the video so that each photo would have a duration of 2 seconds, that would had been the longest photo slideshow at 8 hours, 34 minutes, and 20 seconds. I could not have the photo duration at 3 seconds because that would exceed YouTube video limit of 12 hours.
If you were to extract each image from the full HD video, you would have 2 megapixel images - since each image is 1920 x 1080 at a 16:9 aspect ratio.
The greatest challenge in creating a slideshow of thousands of images is first accumulating all of those images (so that each image is unique from one another), processing the images into a video, and organizing the project perfectly.
The 15,430 images I had were family photos from 1885 02 11 to 2016 12 26 (they were all .jpeg format).
How to create a massive slideshow
I have not found a slideshow program that could render thousands of images into a video slide show - its just too much to process with too many operations to execute for any one program.
I had to resort to batch processing. That is to use simple programs that can execute a single operation involving many files at a time.
The first batch processing program I used was the Bulk Rename Utility (freeware) to rename all of my image files sequentially.
Initially all of my family image files are names as such; 1998 06 23 0003 (year, month, day, and index number) The index number 0003 means the 3rd picture taken of that day.
However, despite trying to be perfectly organized, I had 174 images out of 15,430 that had the same name so my computer added to the name (1), (2), (3), and so on. Because you cannot have files of the exact same name in the same folder. And the Bulk Rename Utility failed to appropriately rename those files because its first operation is to ignore a certain count of characters of the old name.
The files had to be named, photo_00001, photo_00002, and so forth to work properly in this project. If there was a single photo number skipped - the final processing would fail.
So because of those 174 misnamed files, I had to find the 174 instances of the photo number that had been skipped.
And even the Bulk Rename Utility cannot handle all 15,430 files at once, so I had to rename 3,000 files at a time.
The moral of the story is perfect organization.
Secondly I had to prepare each image to have the same dimensions of 1920 x 1080 because most of the images were different shapes and dimensions. And they all have to be the exact same dimension for the end process to work.
I used a program called FastStone Photo Resizer (freeware). Which allowed me to resize each image to a perfect 1920 x 1080 (2 megapixel image). The program has a great function known as 'smart crop' where it will fit any shaped image within the specified dimensions and fill in the empty sides with a solid color of your choosing. The FastStone Photo Resizer can handle 15,430 images, and did so in a time of 8 hours.
The 3rd last program I used was Virtual Dub (freeware). You can load at least 15,430 images to Virtual Dub to create a video photo slideshow (from my experience).
However all the image files must be named as such; photo_0001, photo_0002, and so forth. The following example would work for 9,999 images. For my project I had to add an extra '0' to the 'photo_' name because I had to count back from one's, tens, hundreds, thousands, and ten thousands.
And all images must be the same format like .jpeg and be of the same dimensions.
Once all your images are contained in a folder, all you need to do is simply drag the first image to Virtual Dub and the rest of the images will follow.
The last program I used was AVS4U for you. The reason being was that Virtaul Dub created such a huge AVI file (20 GB), and that is the data upload limit of YouTube (as far as I know). AVS4U is not freeware but I am confident that many free video converters can be found online.
Once I used AVS4U to convert the 20 GB file, I had the final 8 GB AVI 1920 x 1080 HD Video to upload to YouTube.
Things to consider
I highly recommend no less than 1 picture per second because at 1 second you still know what you are looking at, and furthermore you have enough time to fully appreciate it. It is definable and appreciable.
If you start having pictures lasting fractions of a second, they will simply go by too quickly. And at say, 12 pictures a second you start perceiving movement (if the pictures are of the same subject). In other words - its no longer a photo slideshow - its a video. In either case, if your not percieving movement your percieving 'blur'.
Also every picture ought to be uniquely different than any other picture. It's not as much of an achievement if you only repeat the same series of pictures, and of course it seems that less impressive.
The over-all concept is simple if you use the right programs. In this case I had to use batch processing programs cause there is no one program that could do all the operations required.
But perfect organization is a must, and expect trial and error. I was playing with the idea of doing a 4k version, I even spent 17 hours resizing images to dimensions of 3840 x 2160. But soon realized that I would probably surpass YouTube's imposed data upload limit of 20 GB.
To put all into perspective, given YouTube's 12 hour video limit, one could produce a photo slide show of 43,200 images (at 1 photo / second) but it could not be in HD because the likely file size would be 22 GB (2 GB past YouTube data upload limit).
I accomplished about 35% of whats possible in the realm of high definition.
Hope you enjoyed my article.
